UNC is about to upgrade to Koha 3.12. This is a really stable release, with several enhancements we will cover in future posts.

The biggest change for us is the adoption of DEB packages as our way to deploy Koha in our Ubuntu 12.04 LTS servers. This deployment method and the tools these packages provide ease the maintenance tasks and make the upgrade path straightforward for our IT people.

As we said in previous posts, we depend on the use of an indexer daemon because of the load our servers get during busy hours (we have 38 instances running on the same server and setting a cron job simply kills our server). In order to have the indexer to work on a DEB install some patches we contributed are needed. They have not been pushed yet, and are available on bug 8773 for the curious. Until those patches get pushed, we need to build our own packages which include them.

We have also set our own DEB repository to make our packages available (for us, and for anyone willing to give them a test ride). To test our repository, follow these steps.